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Cybercrime: Mercury News on Ghosts in the Browser: Protecting yourself online

It’s a busy time if year for shopping, traveling, spoofing and hacking. Do you know where your credit card number is right now?  And I trust that your ATM card is safely tucked away (PIN secure) and hasn’t been duplicated by an unsavory individual intent on depleting your bank account via a corner store ATM in a far off land.

Check out Ryan Blitstein’s special report in the Mercury News on how thieves are using computers and the Internet to commit cybercrimes.

Part I: How online crooks put us all at risk
A group of high-tech entrepreneurs has turned the Internet into a tool for massive fraud.

Part II: How well are we protecting ourselves?
Businesses, governments, and citizens fail to take precautions, allowing cybercrooks to thrive.

Part III: U.S. targets terrorists as online thieves run amok
The U.S. government isn’t devoting the resources needed to combat Internet crime. 

Additional, related articles and links from the Merc:

  • Online crooks often escape prosecution
  • 10 ways to protect yourself online
  • Anti-cybercrime laws a tough sell in Congress
  • San Jose police fight online crime; resources scarce in other cities
  • Legislation: Watered down, slowed down
  • Digital detective work
  • More from Part I: Storm rages across Web
  • Cybercrook’s dictionary
  • Tool prices for online criminals
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    Coming December 11: The Windows Cumulative DST & TZ Update for 2008

    Coming December 11th to an Internet connection near you: the 2008 Cumulative Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone update for Windows OSes.  And yes, Venezuela is part of this update.  This update is now available for IT Pros and SysAdmins as a download from Microsoft KB Article 942763.


    Generally, end users do not have to install these updates manually, as updates like this one will be installed automagically via Windows Update beginning on December 11, 2007 rather than download and install these from the Microsoft Download Centre (as noted in the KB article link above).  For end users who have their PCs managed by a central administrator, please contact your IT administrator for information on how PCs on your network will be updated. 


    More about Venezuela. Typically, the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has observed South America Western Standard Time. According to current official reports, the start date for new time zone is yet to be determined, but reported to occur on December 9th, 2007.


    When customers move their Windows clients to the new time zone, clocks will move backwards 30 minutes, from UTC -4:00 to UTC -4:30. This change begins at 2:59:59 PM local time on the start date. Clocks should be moved back to 2:30:00 PM rather than advancing to 3:00:00 AM. For more information, please see Microsoft KB article 942763 for the Windows Cumulative Update.


    For a Web log of the most common questions and answers about moving appointments from one time zone to another for Venezuela, visit the following Web site:


    http://blogs.technet.com/dst2007/archive/2007/10/04/time-zone-move-and-the-outlook-time-zone-data-update-tool.aspx


    Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, DST.

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    Snowing in Seattle

    New Seattle snow + no sitter = no evening out. ;(

    We had to cancel our busy evening plans due to several factors, much of which was due to snow.  Up to a couple of inches in our area, much of which has stuck for the night. (It’s not that common.) 

    Oh, well.

    We made lemonade: the boys loved it and built a couple of snow men in the front yard, followed by cocoa with dinner.

    Have a good weekend.

     

    More info:

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    Bringo, GetHuman offer ways to avoid phone tree hell

    “Thank you for reading our blog today. Your visit is VERY important to us. Please select from the following options. Please make sure you read through to the entire menu because our options have recently changed.”


    OK, not really.  All options are still available in the left-hand nav. And happy December – we have snow on the ground today.

    I read about an interesting new company featured in the Seattle Times today (courtesy of Craig Crossman, McClatchy-Tribune News Service): Bringo, serving customers calling a company with automated phone trees:


    “(In the automated phone tree) you finally hear the option you want and press it. You are then presented with a sub-menu of choices. “Please select one of the following seven items.” You listen and then make another selection. You then hear “Please select from the following six options,” and so it continues.


    “It is somewhere around the third sub-menu that your mounting frustration makes you either give up or start pressing random phone keys in hopes that you might be connected to a live person who can actually help you.

    When you finally navigate all the appropriate menu options, you discover that you now have to wait 17 minutes. When you do finally speak to a live person, you have to swallow your tongue, least you make a comment you may regret later. There must be a better way to quickly get to a live person on the phone, and now thanks to Bringo, there is.”


    Bringo was featured with Gethuman.com in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, “two Web sites designed to help callers connect to an employee and bypass automated systems.”

    And I like Bringo. 

    Start by visiting the Bringo Web site and search through the list of companies on their web site that you’re interested in speaking to a live person. Noted as a Chicago health-care technology, Bringo provides nearly a thousand listings.  You type in your phone number and hit a button that says “fetch.” The site rings your phone within seconds to verify that the request is legitimate.

    According to Bringo’s site, here’s how it works:


    1. Find the company you’d like to call by category (credit cards, mortgages, loans, health care)
    2. Enter your phone # (we will never disclose your phone number to anyone, not even your mother!).
    3. Wait a few seconds while we navigate the phone tree.
    4. When we call you back, pick up your phone and you’re done. No more phone trees.

    Ready to get started?


    • Click here to list all categories of companies
    • Click here for an alphabetical list of all companies

    But where are the tech companies and broadband service providers in the list of popular services?  It makes sense that these companies don’t make the top ten list of companies called (but all companies I tried to reach in the last couple of weeks.) 

    Interestingly enough, I found that of the company categories listed, I recently called only one type: Credit Cards.  For most of the others, most of my inquiries are over the web or email, even live chat.

    Oddly, AT&T Wireless isn’t listed (it’s reached via the listing for Cingular), and Comcast isn’t listed in the ISP list.  And on the computer hardware page, Dell numbers occupy more than a third of the listings.  But that stuff is easily fixed.

    Back to what works. 

    Bringo’s site navigates the company’s phone tree for you, and then calls you back when it finally finds a live person (or in the queue).

    So, let’s take a look at Bringo’s main entry for Microsoft:


    Microsoft: Avoid the phone tree and talk directly to a human at Microsoft. Microsoft is leading software company. Its main products are: Windows XP, MS Office, Internet Explorer. Company owns also MSN.com website and manufacturers XBOX 360 game console.

    This company’s operators may answer very quickly after we navigate the phone tree. This may cause them to hang up before you are connected. In the event that this happens, you may try Bringo again, or dial them directly and press “0” at each prompt when connection is established.


    Sweet. 😉

    So, before using the service, try dialing the number that Bringo has listed on their site and see if you get a live person quickly. 

    BTW, for Microsoft Tech Support, call (in the US) 1-800‑642‑7676, and press 0 at each prompt, ignoring messages.  (Thanks, GetHuman.)

    As with gethuman.com, take a look at the telephone number listings on the sites and paths for getting a hold of a live person.  But when you are faced with the dreaded automated warning, “your call will be handled in twenty minutes,” head over to Bringo and see if that works for you.


    Tags: Microsoft, Customer Service, Customer Support.

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    What I’ve read: A look at the reading pile for the week

    Quick post between meetings that I wrote up before the kids headed off to school today… a week’s worth articles from the reading file for you. As noted these are all (for the most part, Nov 20-30) available for download, making it easy to read the files off-line.

    Have a good weekend.

    The customer and the CEO (indiatimes.com)  While many factors including brand equity, pricing, service and quality play an important role in maintaining a brand’s success in the marketplace , in an increasingly competitive scenario, customer service has become a distinguishing tool.

    Costco boss bucks Wall Street by being generous to workers, customers

    HP expands PC market share lead over Dell in 3Q07, says iSuppli   Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the third quarter continued to expand its lead over rival Dell in the global PC market, shipping 13.1 million PCs, a 32.7% and 3.2 million unit increase from 9.9 million in the third quarter of 2006.

    Taiwan market: Toshiba and Sony to launch new blue-laser drives (digitimes)  Jimmy Hsu, Taipei; Adam Hwang, DIGITIMES 11/30/07 — There will be a promotion competition between the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) standards at the IT Month expo in Taipei, which will run from December 1-9, with Toshiba scheduled to launch its IDE-interface…

    Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs | The Register — By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View, 11/30/07 — Dell agreed to ship PCs and laptops with the Ubuntu operating system after more than 130,000 people promoted the notion on the company’s IdeaStorm web site.

    BetaNews | Microsoft shows off Windows Mobile update, but not 7.0  By Nate Mook, BetaNews, November 29, 2007, 3:58 PM — Two dozen invited attendees to Microsoft’s Mobius event in Amsterdam this week got a first peek at the next update to Windows Mobile.

    Zune 2.0: Playing Tomorrow’s Tune? (businessweek) by Stephen H. Wildstrom, 11/28/07 — It won’t catch the iPod soon, but it may be a harbinger of the subscription era. One thing you can say for Microsoft (MSFT): It doesn’t give up without a fight.

    Mike Walker’s Ramblings about Industry Architecture : How NOT To Use PowerPoint “This is a bit off topic but I thought it was pretty funny. Since I do a my fair share of public speaking I thought I would share some comedic wisdom with you after this long holiday weekend.”

    Microsoft gets better at carrying a Zune – International Herald Tribune  By David Pogue, Nov 29, 2007 — “Microsoft might finally be getting the hang of hardware. The company’s overall track record for designing gadgets is pretty awful. Remember the Smart Display? The Spot Watch? The Ultra-Mobile PC? The original Zune? Me neither.

    The Day the Video Games Died (extremetech) By Joel Durham Jr. , 11/29/07 — A reviewer’s view of SOny and Xbox replacement policies for impacted hardware. “So I’m down two consoles, one of which I had to replace by dropping $180 on a new one (and wait for the online stop to ship it to me).

    RAID Class Terabyte Hard Drives Reviewed–Western Digital WD10EACS and Seagate Barracuda ES.2 (extremetech.com) For this article, we’ve tested and reviewed a pair of enterprise RAID class terabyte hard drives, and also compared their performance with a few desktop terabyte drives.

    Three-Way Music Software Comparison featuring Cakewalk, ACID Music, and MAGIX Music  By Joel Durham Jr. 11/28/2007 — “Who needs a band? If you can jot down a few lyrics, wield a mouse, and maybe bang some keys on a MIDI keyboard, you can create your very own music.

    How Does Bruce Schneier Protect His Laptop Data? With His Fists — and PGP (Wired) Bruce Schneier 11.29.07 — “Perhaps encryption isn’t so easy after all, and some people could use a little primer. This is how I protect my laptop.”

    Microsoft hit with $5 million lawsuit over Halo 3, Xbox 360 problems  A federal lawsuit filed against Microsoft and Bungie last week attempts to throw some serious doubt into the mix. The suit alleges that Halo 3 “routinely, consistently, and systematically ‘froze,’ ‘crashed,’ or ‘locked up.'”

    IEBlog : IE Automatic Component Activation (Changes to IE ActiveX Update) Back in April 2006, we made a change to how Internet Explorer handled embedded controls used on some webpages. Some sites required users to “click to activate” before they could interact with the control. … saved by 49 other people …

    XP SP3 speed lead over Vista SP1 narrows under similar workloads (BetaNews) By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews, 11/27/07 — A heavily promoted performance test by an evaluation software firm appeared to situate Windows Vista SP1 performance against Windows XP SP3.

    Time to end the digital ‘arms race’ of parental spying? | Tech news blog – CNET News.com “Online safety for teens is a complex issue that cannot be covered in one blog post, but the CBS Evening News series gave me a lot of food for thought. They posed the question, is parental spying on teen Internet use an “invasion of privacy…”

    America ships electronic waste overseas – NewsFlash – OregonLive.com 11/18/2007 By TERENCE CHEA (AP) — Most Americans think they’re helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they’re contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers…

    Fry’s shoppers offered chance to cut in line – for a price (Local News, KING5.com) By BERNARD CHOI / KING 5 News, 11/23/07 — Fry’s Electronics is known for ads touting low prices, but nowhere on its day-after-Thanksgiving sale advertisement did it mention a special offer some people found questionable.

    NPR : Naughty Customers Deserve Some Blame Day to Day, November 26, 2007 ¡ On “Black Friday,” Day to Day aired a segment about lagging customer service. Listener David W. Miller wrote in to say customers are the ones with the bad attitude.

    If you receive bad service, complain about it (Vancouver Sun) Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun, 11/27/07. “If we do nothing about it and let service crumble, we deserve to be treated like pond scum. If you can stand one more discussion about the abysmal state of customer service in Metro Vancouver…

    Verizon Wireless to Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option for Customers in 2008 – Forbes.com 11/27/07. Verizon Wireless today announced that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company.

    Hey Skype, how about some phone-based customer service? | IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband | ZDNet.com Posted by Russell Shaw 11/26/07. “Skype has some serious customer service and support issues. It was one thing to provide minimum four-day Web-based response when Skype was Web-based only.

    Customer service bane of new banks: McKinsey- Hindustan Times  Narayanan Madhavan, Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 11/26/07. A comprehensive survey of the Indian banking system by global consulting firm McKinsey reveals that new banks including private and foreign ones lose out to old nationalized banks…

    Is it satisfied customers you’re after? NO – EagleTribune.com, North Andover, MA By JEFFrey Gitomer, Eagle-Tribune, 11/25/07. “Every company is hoping that their customers will reorder. They’re hoping that their customers will spread the word about how great their products are and about how great their people are.

    Amazon’s customer service number, revealed! – – Slate Magazine — Timothy Noah, tired of companies hiding from their customers—by creating Web sites that offered no contact information for consumers in distress, for example—took on a mission: “to compel Web-based retailers to take phone calls from the public.”

    On the hunt for a Zune 80? Good luck – USATODAY.com  The view at USA Today that the Zune 80 is the must-have, hard-to-get device this holiday season.

    Out Of The Box : Another reason to like Vista — “If you can find a good machine that is from a company that makes good drivers (and has hardware partners that are making nice behaving drivers), then you will have a good experience with Windows Vista. That’s why I’m enjoying 64 bit Vista on my Lenovo T61…”

    .net DEvHammer : Add Silverlight video to your blog Thanks to the folks in Expression Media and the Silverlight Streaming it is now amazingly easy to add video (or other Silverlight content to you blog with Windows Live Writer. With nearly any blog host, you can write your blog, “Insert Silverlight Video”

    Adrian Ford : DOCX to XPS

    Office Natural Language Team Blog : MSR blog on the Microsoft Research Machine Translation system  Our colleagues from the Microsoft Research (MSR) group have started blogging about the statistical machine translation (MSR-MT) system they are developing. We announced the Windows Live Translator when it was launched in September.

    NZ Academic Alliance Blog : XNA Game Studio 2.0 Beta Released Check out the new XNA game studio 2.0 beta which is available on the XNA Creators Club Online here!

    Buying Guide: HDTVs Up Close – Reviews by PC Magazine We lay out the major types of HDTVs and what key factors you should consider before buying.

    Windows Time Service blog The official blog site for the Windows Time Service

    A taste of Apple’s public relations – istartedsomething

    BetaNews | Invasion of the Eee: Asus plans something small for CES By Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews, November 16, 2007, 3:30 PM Hardly content to rest on its laurels with its widely heralded Eee “PC gadget,” Taiwan-based Asus has additional slick consumer products in mind for display at CES.

    BetaNews | Microsoft refreshes Vista’s value proposition  By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews November 15, 2007, 11:33 AM Vista’s Software Assurance customers need more value from Vista more often, and now the company has a plan for addressing their needs come next spring.

    BetaNews | Microsoft to Sell Downloadable Full Xbox Games By Nate Mook, BetaNews November 14, 2007, 2:17 PM To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Xbox Live, Microsoft is preparing a system update that will be delivered to users starting December 4 and bring support for downloading full versions of older Xbox games…

    Health: Prolonged Sitting Causes Disease, Standing Fights It A recent study at the University of Missouri-Columbia reaffirms that a sedentary life increases your risk of diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity, but the study suggests that even if you get in the recommended 30 minutes of activity…

    The Paperless Map Is the Killer App (businessweek) Forget media downloads. Cell customers really want GPS and navigation features: First, cell phones made the streetcorner pay phone obsolete. Now they’re doing away with the need to ask for directions. A surge in phones with built-in satellite navigation…

    Computing Heads for the Clouds (businessweek) Nov 16, 2007 — IBM, Yahoo!, and Google are all putting the power of cloud computing to work. Here’s a short primer on how the new technology works, by Aaron Ricadela

    HP’s Cultural Revolution (businessweek) Nov 15, 2007 — To pick up the pace of innovation, the tech giant is betting on startups and injecting their DNA into its operations, by Reena Jana

    How to Pay for Kids (businessweek) Parents today will spend more than $300,000, on average, to raise a kid from birth to age 21. Here are tips for making ends meet, by Lauren Young

    Mounting Peer-to-Peer Pressure for Comcast Comcast’s traffic-filtering efforts are the subject of FCC complaints and a lawsuit. At issue: ISPs right to control the flow of data over their networks by Peter Burrows

    Tags: misc, articles, what I read. (Nov 20-30).